Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill

The House is resumed. Good morning. When the House rose last night, we were on the third reading of the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. We are up to speaker No. 6—Dr James McDowall.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and good morning to the House. It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of ACT to speak at the third reading of the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. For what it’s worth, ACT is taking a more straightforward approach in how we’re voting for this bill. It was interesting to listen to the speeches yesterday and last night from the National Party friends over there, but also from other parties in this House. Our more straightforward approach is simply that on balance, there is more that we dislike about this bill than we like, so we are opposing it at third reading.

We had some more questions that we would have liked to ask in committee stage, but none the less that was concluded, and our concerns for this bill are around the unintended consequences—what we see as potentially disproportionate penalties that can be applied which could severely impact people and their property, particularly in the event where that person or business that owns a vehicle is, effectively, punished despite having nothing to do with the situation. We understand there are recourses, there are ways to repossess vehicles, and it’s just a lot of red tape and a lot of additional cost.

The bill itself, while on the whole having good intentions, is too broad. It raises too many questions, and I reflect on some of the scenarios and situations that other members have highlighted, particularly those where we have a fleeing driver who flees police and commits a raft of offences in the process, if not leading up to the event, often injuring someone or worse, destroying property and so on. The reality is the measures introduced in this bill will be the least of their legal problems, and the disincentive isn’t necessarily there—they are already committing a range of offences.

The comparisons to other countries, particularly in Europe, is quite interesting—countries with much lower road deaths per capita. Most of those countries have much higher speed limits than New Zealand does. I’ve lived overseas for a while and obviously it varies from country to country, but you can go from the Netherlands and go to Germany and a lot of their autobahns still have no speed limits, and those that do sit around 120 and in some cases 130. So it’s an interesting comparison.

We do not feel the point-to-point or average speed camera should be a feature of this bill. It is a potentially significant, punitive revenue-gathering exercise that targets the masses, not fleeing drivers—not just those committing specific offences.

We question how this technology would operate alongside traditional ambush tactics at present. How would those enforcement tools interact? Would they overlap, meaning someone in theory could get fined twice for a single speeding offence? Perhaps an option is to have one system of either ambush tactics in a certain area or the speed cameras, but not both. But that’s obviously not a feature of this bill, and I suspect the Government has little appetite for getting rid of speed traps.

The consultation for this bill was insufficient, being from only 19 May to 4 June, which is about the time it takes to get a stock standard, overdue written question back. The majority of the submissions to the committee disagreed with the bill and we hear those concerns, and one of those concerns is that it may not make the roads actually safer, especially from those who have absolutely no regard for the law in the first place. We’ve heard in contributions that with fatalities sitting around 10 percent as a result of speed alone, this may not be actually targeting quite the right thing.

There are aspects and elements of this bill that we can get on board with, and we’ve spoken to that, but there is too much there. Property will be destroyed or seized without sufficient notice, and there are concerns around the insurance companies and the finance companies, and yet here we are in the dying days of this Parliament, on the second to last day, having to see this through, along with a whole raft of other pieces of legislation that were consulted at some stage, some time ago, or had very little consultation at all and were left to the last minute.

The costs of the scheme are unknown, which in this current fiscal environment is a hard sell, and more unknown are the costs to third parties, to sectors like the insurance sector and the finance sector. It will be a costly implementation, getting these cameras up and all the systems in line with that and all the extra staff. As my colleague Simon Court discussed during the committee stage, if we’re going to be putting cameras up on our roads, wouldn’t it be better to look at congestion charging so that we can actually fund our roads better and make our roads safer, because, at the end of the day, a lot of the issues with fatal crashes and accidents come down to bad roads.

Yes, we agree that crime is out of control. Fleeing drivers are part of that problem, but a bill that focuses too heavily on property and issuing speeding tickets is not a solution to mitigate random criminal activity. It is a band-aid at best and one that will generate a fair share of paperwork and court time. We’d also caution the Government, as a last note, to keep an eye on this regime and how it rolls out, because the punitive measures in this bill will undoubtedly cause considerable financial hardship for many, not only those that have fallen foul of it themselves, directly, but those who are indirectly connected to a situation and bear no criminal responsibility.

On the whole, we don’t believe this bill is tough or smart on crime. It’s quite a rough approach and ACT is opposing it.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. When it comes to road safety, the evidence is very clear: countries like Sweden, Ireland, Canada, and Norway had comparable rates of death and serious injuries per capita to New Zealand just 20 years ago—in the case of Ireland and Canada, only about 10 or 15 years ago—and they embarked on a programme called Vision Zero, which was a safe systems approach to road safety and they demonstrated that you can significantly reduce deaths and serious injuries on the road, which is what we should all be aiming to do. In Sweden, where this approach was pioneered, they had cross-party support, after a particularly devastating accident took the lives of many young children.

Now, in some places they’ve actually achieved this. In cities like Oslo, there hasn’t been a single person killed who was on foot, on a bike, or a young person who has died in a car crash. So the Vision Zero approach, while you could say, “Yeah, you never get to zero.”—that’s true. But by taking this approach where we say it’s not an acceptable side effect of our transport system, we’re going to put safety first, like we have done in workplaces, because, ultimately, human life is the most important thing to us—the lives of our friends and whānau and our children—we can have a transport system that’s much safer.

So the provisions in this bill around the point-to-point safety cameras are a positive step, the best way to approach speed. I’ve heard some misleading statistics used in this House about speed not being the cause of most crashes; it is the major factor, though, that decides whether the crash results in a death or serious injury. So you can have minor crashes that are not caused by speed, but if speed is involved—high speed—it’s much more likely to result in death and serious injury, and that’s why appropriate speed limits are so important, and the point-to-point safety cameras can give you a better, accurate reading of what the average speeds were doing in a particular point on the road. So, rather than just that one point, they take the average along a stretch of road.

The whole approach with the safety cameras was meant to be changing behaviour and not penalising people and raising revenue. So the idea is that you have a lot of cameras—this is what Sweden’s done. You have a lot of cameras—you’re using point-to-point safety cameras—but we’re signposting them well and we’re using them in the areas where people would tend to travel higher than the safe speed, and people know that. So they change their behaviour and so you have fewer deaths and serious injuries. In no way should this be seen as a way of raising revenue. In an ideal scenario, you’re losing money on it, because people are changing their behaviour. They’re taking the speed that is appropriate for the road and there’s much less likely to be a death or serious injury as a consequence.

Even in the state of Victoria, we can see the success of this road safety approach, and I think it’s a shame that it’s become a political football, thanks to parties like the ACT Party and the National Party, who will jump on any change and find any reason to defend the status quo rather than achieve an outcome that most New Zealanders truly want, in their hearts. So that’s the situation we’re in.

But the rest of the bill, unfortunately, we cannot support because the issue around confiscation of vehicles from fleeing drivers, unfortunately, I think, crosses the line. It’s unlikely to solve the problem of fleeing drivers. We do absolutely agree with the approach the police took to stop pursuing when it was leading to fatal crashes—an incredibly dangerous situation for people when that happens. So that was a really good approach, but we need to do more to address the drivers of crime, and until we have a transport system where people aren’t so reliant on private vehicles, it’s punitive to take away the vehicle.

Now, we could have transport that’s less reliant on private vehicles, and that would be good for equity and many other things, and that’s something the Green Party is definitely advocating for—giving people more options to get where they need to go without having to own and run a car all the time to get there. But the provisions in this bill that then say that vehicles can be confiscated even if it’s not necessarily the owner of the vehicle who was the one fleeing the police are, we think, too problematic. So the Green Party cannot support this bill.

Good morning, Mr Speaker. Thank you. It’s my pleasure to stand and take a short call on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. I’m just going to start by noting that this Government’s got a real vision, and I start with that because we’re hearing from the Opposition benches a lot of moaning about the fact that this is the second to last sitting day of Parliament for the term and how dare we have the audacity to be in here passing legislation, progressing our agenda, and taking New Zealand forward?

Here we have a bill that increases penalties for fleeing drivers, and then we’ve got the ACT Party—“the tough on crime party”, as their billboards say—saying that they can’t support this bill that gets tougher on crime. So I find that quite interesting.

But one thing I also want to pick up on from comments made by the Opposition is that they’re concerned about the point-to-point cameras because they might be too complicated for us to put in here, in New Zealand. There’s plenty of evidence, as my colleague from the Green Party mentioned before, showing that they do work to ensure that drivers drive at safe conditions. So it’s my privilege to commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to this third reading of the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. It was interesting to hear about that vision of the Labour Party, and it’s useful to know that that vision will be a rear vision in Kowhai Park and the Dublin Street McDonald’s by the previous member who just spoke, Steph Lewis, as National returns to Government in a couple of months’ time.

Now, safety is the focus of this bill, and I wanted to mention a couple that actually died driving in Dunedin in the last couple of days. It was noted in the New Zealand Herald that the children survived but this couple didn’t—very sad story.

This bill is one that we are happy to support, although there are a couple of pot-holes in this bill that I wanted to comment on.

Barbara Kuriger: Only two?

TAMA POTAKA: Three. The public need safety on the roads, and this situation we have with fleeing drivers—double the number of fleeing drivers recorded between 2021 and 2022 compared to the previous year—is something that the bill seeks to address and seeks to attend to. Fleeing drivers have been a problem not only in Whanganui, where the previous member mentioned, but also in places like Hamilton—Hamilton West down Ulster Street—and other places in that great city of ours.

So enabling more enforcement tools for fleeing drivers, we absolutely support. Seizing and impounding various waka if they fail to stop—that’s something that we’re happy to support as well, but the enforcement tools around point-to-point cameras, that’s something that we don’t support. We don’t support that part of the legislation, primarily because, you know, less than 10 percent of the crashes that cause fatal injuries are caused by speed. What we think the Government should be focused on, and this legislation should have addressed along the way, is more effort around drink driving, drug driving—kombucha driving is OK—wearing seatbelts, and other tools and mechanisms that the police can use to ensure that people are driving safely. So that’s the big focus for the National Party.

Now, we will help restore and encourage greater safety on the roads by doing things at an infrastructure end, by building that great highway between Kahikatea Drive and the Waikato Expressway, by widening roads, by fixing pot-holes, and by doing other things, and we think that more effort should have been put into that space, into that area, rather than the narrow focus that’s enabled by this bill.

In our thinking, there’s broader infrastructure issues that can enable public safety on the roads in a better manner. This bill focuses on two or three things that are caught up in the promises of the current Government to the electorate, but reducing the fleeing of cars is something that we’re absolutely supportive of.

There are some broader issues around crime that intersect with this legislation, such as the absolute focus of the current Government on reducing the prison population. The Government says, “Well, all is well in that space.”, but we actually think that the fleeing drivers and some of the public safety concerns intersect with the criminal justice system.

So what we’re saying today is, yes, we support this bill, it’s heading in the right direction, we know it’s at the third reading; no, we don’t support everything, but we’re happy to see it through to the next stage. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill at its third reading. I just want to note that the overall objectives of this bill are to improve road safety and improve accountability for those who break the rules in important matters of road safety—so, in short, encouraging more public safety. There are three primary changes that will be introduced by this bill: firstly, lengthening the time that a vehicle can be impounded when a driver fails to stop; a new power to impound a vehicle when there’s information a fleeing driver has not provided; and also increasing the disqualification period for a failure to stop. These are sensible, pragmatic solutions that deliver answers to real safety concerns that New Zealanders face, and I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe te Mana Whakawā. Mihi ana ki a koutou. Ata mārie. I’m pleased to take a short call on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. I want to first of all acknowledge the 377 people who lost their lives tragically in this way. One is one too many and there’s nothing worse than getting that knock on the door to hear such tragic news. So I just wanted to spare a thought for them.

I welcome this bill and I welcome what it means. In particular, I just want to acknowledge the impoundment of the fleeing vehicles. I think six months is reasonable. It gives those drivers time to reflect and to think about their behaviour, and hopefully in a way that is going to make some changes in their lives. I am also supportive of the vehicle impoundment for failing to provide that information. This is very, very important. It’s just unfortunate with the world today that this sort of behaviour happens. So here we are—we have to do what we have to do to help protect our communities.

Also the vehicle forfeiture—yes, absolutely. Support the idea of having to seize these vehicles and to retain those proceeds by the Crown for purposes that I’m sure we can always find. Also the pointto-point cameras and the automated infringements.

Our heart is fully in this bill. It needs to happen. Yes, this is the right direction. I commend this to the House. Kia ora.

Oh thanks, Mr Speaker. I come late to the party on this, but we are supporting the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. I was expecting to speak on this last night and I was going through reading the bill, and I couldn’t help but think, well, it’s about time. How has it taken six years for this Government to give the police some backing and some support and to empower them to actually go about doing their jobs of helping to make New Zealand roads safer? Of course, the objective of the bill is to reduce unsafe behaviour on our roads by increasing the speed and severity of enforcement, but one would argue that this could’ve happened a very long time ago, and one has to scratch one’s head at the very fact that the decision was even made to prevent police from pursuing fleeing vehicles in the first place.

So here we are, anyway. We’re having to fix up a mistake that was made, and we’re happy to support that, because on this side of the House we do support legislation that supports our police. Nobody will disagree with the provisions within the bill, and, indeed, National won’t, but we will support legislation that gets tough on crime and, indeed, makes New Zealanders safer.

It does give new powers to the police when it comes to fleeing drivers. They’ll be able to seize and impound vehicles for up to six months, licence removal will go from 12 months to 24, and vehicles can also be apparently “forfeited [upon] conviction for … failing-to-stop” on that new offence.

It is a shame that it’s had to come to this. As I said earlier, it really never should have come to this in the first place, particularly when you look at the data. The number of fleeing drivers between December 2020 and 2021 was 4,846, but that same data showed the number of fleeing drivers between November 2021 and November 2022 was 9,499. That’s an extraordinary increase in people who realised they weren’t going to be pursued by police so they were going to take full advantage of it. Of course, as we’ve seen, particularly on motorways around the bigger cities like Auckland, there have been unfortunate consequences of those fleeing drivers when they’ve been involved in fatal accidents. As Soraya Peke-Mason did very gracefully point out, we should all take a moment to remember those people who lost their lives, and, indeed, their families, who will still be grieving.

We’re looking forward to hopefully, if we get over the line in October, having the opportunity to take a more holistic look rather than these sorts of belts and braces approaches. We believe that road safety in New Zealand begins, fundamentally, with improving the state of our roads but, of course, as well empowering our police to get tough on these offenders who up till now have had a pretty free rein. Indeed, we do know, particularly with reference to the likes of ram-raiders, nine out of 10 of those people involved in ram raids should actually be at school, and, indeed, they’ve also got a huge amount of gang influence penetrating into those groups as well. So, with that, I conclude my comments, and we do commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and take the final call on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. This bill is about improving accountability and it’s about helping to change behaviour. As somebody who’s worked with young drivers for a very long time, we know that they think differently and they make some very rash decisions, and the opportunity to escape is far too often one that they take. This bill reflects and responds to that.

This is about changing behaviour. It’s really great to hear from the other side of the House the support for the significant investment we’ve made into our roading infrastructure. My local high school down in Stratford—seeing the changes to the roading layout outside the school, just to help to change behaviour and support people driving slower. All those school buses coming in and kids tearing out—rushing to school in the mornings. So it’s great to hear the support for the significant investment we’re making into safety, and this is another thing that will help to improve the safety on our roads, and I commend this bill to the House.